1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to measuring, evaluating and grading fabric/textile structure/garment appearance.
2. Description of Prior Art
Fabric/garment/textile structure appearance includes many aspects such as pilling, wrinkling, seam puckering, and so forth. Although the invention applies to different aspects of fabric/textile structure/garment appearance, we explain below the effect of wrinkling on appearance. Wrinkles are three dimensional versions of creases, and form when fabrics are forced to develop high levels of double curvature, which result in some degree of permanent in-plane and out-of-plane deformations. Due to the importance of wrinkle recovery in the appearance of garments or textiles, many methods of assessment have been developed since the early 1950s. One of the most widely used in U.S. is the AATCC Test method. This method allows expert observers to compare fabric specimens with a set of six three-dimensional replicas supplied by the American Association of Textile Chemists and Colorists (AATCC), and then assign a grade according to their similarity.
Many attempts have been mode to automate this characterization process using imaging technology instead of visual observations. Laser probing is one way of evaluation of a fabric specimen to measure surface height variations. It incorporates obvious physical meaning and is not influenced by color and pattern in the specimen. However, point-scanning and costs make the method too slow and too expensive for industrial applications. A video camera with a common lighting system can be used to obtain good resolution images of fabric specimens and is faster than using a laser probe, but it is sensitive to fabric colors and patterns, so its application is also limited by its ability to evaluate only fabrics without patterns or designs. A line laser profilometer can be used to improve the detecting efficiency, but line profiles cannot cover a whole fabric surface, and typically sixteen images per sample are needed to produce reliable results